You Don't Have to Be Mad to Work Here: A Psychiatrist’s Life

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Johnny Speight wasn’t racist. His work wasn’t racist. But Alf Garnett was racist. You have to write characters who are bigoted or blind, that’s comedy. Simple as that.” In February 1941 engineering students at the University of Michigan published a joke about English professors in the “The Michigan Technic” magazine:¹² In March 1948 engineer H. Astbury delivered a speech to the Rotary Club of Bury St Edmunds in Suffolk, England. Astbury described an instance using the word “mad” instead” of “crazy”:¹⁴

Nov: You don’t have to be crazy to dance the Charleston, but it helps. (Attributed to Ralph Spence) Not to mention the already overly discussed government tax on migratory bird hunting licenses. Oh well, you don’t have to be a nut to go hunting and fishing, but it helps. But of Speight, who died in 1998 at thee age of 78, Antrobus will say: “ I enjoyed working with him – and drinking with him. He introduced me to George Bernard Shaw.” He said: “Comedy writers weren’t just creating jokes, they had lives, they had problems and they died. When you start it’s a great giggle. They were good days, but there was unhappiness to come.

And now Antrobus has created a new play based around those exciting, if often difficult, times, which he promises is more than a simple ‘tears of a clown’ melodrama or a slice of straightforward nostalgia. It is, we suppose, one of those slightly quaint British phrases that in some way tries to infer that the office in question is a frantic, fast and terribly exciting place to work, fuelled by crazy (as in fun) people and exacting deadlines. The general rule however seems to be the more mundane and sedate the office, the more likely you are to see the sign. Go figure, as the Americans say. In April 1940 the jest was still circulating at the Walt Disney Studio according to a report in a Vancouver, Canada newspaper:¹³ The company roared with laughter when he quoted a motto he had seen over a laboratory In America: “You don’t have to be mad to work here, but it does help.”

This remark fits the following template: “You don’t have to be crazy to X, but it helps” A family of expressions of this type is sometimes called a snowclone. Here is an overview with dates which depicts the evolution of the joke: In November 1933 “The Evansville Press” of Indiana published an article about Mrs. Frank Churchill (formerly Carolyn Kay Shafer) who was the personal secretary of Walt Disney. She credited Disney with a comical instance about the workplace:¹⁰But not everyone in the chaotic Uxbridge Road headquarters was as troubled as he, or the manically depressed Milligan. In conclusion, “You don’t have to be crazy to X, but it helps” is the template of a snowclone. An instance with X = “believe in Free Trade” was circulating by June 1920. The creator was anonymous. Subsequent variants included “play golf” and “dance the Charleston”. In November 1933 Walt Disney received credit for “You don’t have to be crazy to work here, but it helps!” English professing, according to some friends of ours, is one of those things into which some men are pushed. Once in the English professing game, they find it is not necessary to go crazy over the work, but it helps.

The two made an unlikely couple. Antrobus, a right-winger who had just quit Army officer training, and Speight, a straight-talking Stalinist from London’s East End. In November 1925 a movie columnist in “The New York Times” presented a version referring to a popular energetic dance:⁵ In September 1934 a newspaper in Springfield, Illinois printed the following using the word “nut” instead of “crazy”:¹¹ One of the business men of this city remarked last year, when certain fellows were trying to organize a golf club, that “A man don’t have to be crazy to play golf, but it helps a great deal.” That man now carries a golf bag and he plays the game with the rest of the fellows … Sep: You don’t have to be a nut to go hunting and fishing, but it helps. (Columnist Hank in Springfield, Illinois newspaper)I spent two months sending scripts to Galton and Simpson and their new agency Associated London Scripts They partnered me with Speight, this gruff man from the East End.